The focus group that renamed a Columbus insuretech startup worked for "a few glasses of wine and cheese and charcuterie," the CEO said.
Meet Poppins Health, the all-digital administrator of small-business health plans previously known as UnifiHealth. Although fond of the "simplify with Unifi" tagline, co-founder and CEO Ross Klosterman said the original name sounded too much like a legacy insurance behemoth.
Poppins Health Corp. has its first members in Cincinnati and actively is courting small businesses in its hometown of Columbus; Dayton is next with plans for nationwide expansion.
"Every month of the year we will have clients coming on board," Klosterman said.
Poppins designs and manages plans for employers that self-fund health benefits with backup catastrophic reinsurance, so it's not confined to the usual November-December open enrollment season.
The startup has raised a cumulative $7 million in seed financing since the end of 2020 and debuted its first employer-sponsored plans in Cincinnati on March 1.
Poppins aims to triple in size by next year and add about 20 employees to its current dozen. It could grow to 100 jobs over two years.
The co-founders are Olivia Cameron, chief product officer, and Brodie Stone, chief revenue officer. Poppins recently has filled out its management team with additional hires.
The rebranding effort started last fall and culminated in a gathering of friends and family at a home in New York City.
"It was stickies on the wall: What do we want to convey as a health plan?" Klosterman said. "I want to feel I have a trusted partner in my health, someone who cares for me in times of need.
"We asked a small audience over food and wine, what are generic names you associate with these values?"
One name rose to the top, although Klosterman said it's simply a homonym with a certain fictional character who helps the medicine go down.
Poppins built its insurance architecture digitally from the ground up, instead of retrofitting legacy paper rating and enrollment systems. Instead of deductibles, its analytics help set a variable co-payment in part based on quality ratings of the medical provider.
It's centered on advanced primary care, and is expanding in a partnership with Marathon Health, a primary care startup that sees only covered members of self-insured employer clients. Marathon has three clinics so far in the Columbus area, and four in Cincinnati. Another primary care partner is Firefly Health.
Members also can continue seeing their own doctors; the co-payment depends on how Poppins rates them and whether they've formed a partnership.
The software powering many such decisions will help the company reach a larger scale quickly, Klosterman said, but that also makes time for special cases.
For one Cincinnati patient needing a preventative surgery, Klosterman said, the company spent about five hours negotiating the price with the surgeon – in the end saving $100,000 because it was a fair market price and the physician appreciated up-front payment.
The CEO also personally walked one reluctant employee in a Cincinnati plan through the enrollment process.
"He was skeptical of the healthcare system in general and in our plan (at first)," Klosterman said. "He described us as ‘refreshing as hell.’
"That’s why I do what I do every day."
